Narcissism is driven by insecurity, and not self-inflicted consciousness, a new study led by the researchers at New York University found that could also explain what motivates the self-centered nature of their activity. social media.
Perhaps his research, which offers a more detailed understanding of this long-studied wonder, also explains what motivates the self-centered nature of social media activity.
“For a long time, it wasn’t clear why narcissists engage in unpleasant behaviors, such as self-congratulation, because it actually makes others think less of them,” explained Pascal Wallisch, clinical professor in the Department of Psychology of New York University and senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Different Person and Difference. “This has become very common in the age of social media – behavior that has become ‘flexible’.
“Our work shows that these narcissists are not grandiose, but insecure, and this is how they seem to deal with their insecurities.”
“In particular, the results suggest that narcissism is better understood as a compensatory change to overcome and cover low self-worth,” says Mary Kowalchyk, the paper’s lead author and NYU graduate student at the time the study. ”Narcissists are insecure, and they deal with these uncertainties with flexibility. This makes others like them smaller in the long run, thus creating more uncertainty about their insecurities, which in turn leads to a vicious circle of flexible behavior. “
Nearly 300 survey participants – about 60 percent female and 40 percent male – were middle-aged 20 and answered 151 questions via computer.
The researchers studied Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), conceptualized as self-deprecating and made up of two subtypes, known as grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. Associated depression, psychopathy, is also characterized by a grandiose sense of self. They were trying to understand how these conditions apply.
To do so, they designed a modern measure, called PRISN (Performance Reform to Eliminate Uncertainty about SophisticatioN), which produced FLEX (seFf-Elevation perFormative seXf). FLEX captures insecurity-driven self-concepts that are manifested as opinion management, leading to self-elevating trends.
The PRISN scale includes measures commonly used to examine social desirability (“Whoever I talk to is a good listener”), self – esteem (” Overall, I am satisfied with myself “), and psychopathy (” I tend to lack remorse “). FLEX was shown to consist of four components: opinion management (“I tend to show if I get the chance”), the need for social affirmation (“It’s important that I’ve seen at important events ”) , self -elevation (“I have a special taste”), and social leadership (“I like to get to know more than others”).
Overall, the results showed a high correlation between FLEX and narcissism – but not with psychopathy. For example, the need for social detection (metric FLEX) was related to the reported bias of engaging in acting self-promotion (a feature of vulnerable narcissism).
In contrast, measures of psychopathy, such as high levels of self-esteem, showed low correlation levels with vulnerable narcissism, leading to a lack of insecurity. These findings show that true narcissists are insecure and are better defined by the vulnerable narcissism subtype, but a better understanding of grandiose narcissism may be a hallmark of psychopathy.
Other authors of the paper were Helena Palmieri, a NYU psychology doctoral student at the time of the study, and Elena Conte, a NYU undergraduate psychology student.
This story was published from a wire group group with no text changes.